This is a major new study of the cultural foundations of the Tudor plantations in Ireland and of early English imperialism more generally. John Patrick Montaño traces the roots of colonialism in the key relationship of cultivation and civility in Tudor England and shows the central role this played in Tudor strategies for settling, civilising and colonising Ireland. The book ranges from the role of cartography, surveying and material culture – houses, fences, fields, roads and bridges – in manifesting the new order to the place of diet, leisure, language and hairstyles in establishing cultural differences as a site of conflict between the Irish and the imperialising state and as a justification for the civilising process. It shows that the ideologies and strategies of colonisation which would later be applied in the New World were already apparent in the practices, material culture and hardening attitude towards barbarous customs of the Tudor regime.
Filed under: Éire, Empire, Scholarship and insights | Closed
extract in lieu of abstract:
The editors of Ab Imperio invited authors and readers to discuss varieties of colonialism in this issue of the journal. Seemingly, “colonialism” is an obvious category in studies of empire. It is exactly the ability to expand and incorporate new territories and peoples that is commonly held to be a characteristic of empire. Moreover, the modern interpretation of colonialism has brought together the political power of the West European nation-state and the production of knowledge about human diversity. And yet, are all aspects of colonialism so obvious?
The textbook definition of “colony” usually starts (in chronological order) with mentioning settlements on foreign shores by natives of Greek poleis and Roman Italy, then focusing on the modern understanding of colony as an element of geopolitical expansion of the “West” (the developed countries). It is tacitly implied that Greeks spreading to Asia Minor and the Black Sea littoral cannot be discussed in terms of modern Western colonialism: colonies are present, while colonialism is not, inasmuch as there are no conventional characteristics of it. There is no attempt to impose political domination upon overseas territories by Corinth or even Sparta, no economic exploitation of the colonized lands. The word “Metropole” exists, but the relations of “the core and periphery” do not. Hence, no colonialism.
The history of antiquity is sufficiently far from the themes explored by Ab Imperio (“What’s Hecuba to him, or he to Hecuba …?”). However, in an issue dedicated to the role of colonialism in the production of structures and cultures of imperial and postimperial diversity, it is impossible to ignore the obvious “West-centrism” of today’s understanding of colonialism. Is it just modern capitalist overseas empires that conducted colonial policies, and are these policies the only, and exemplary, form of colonialism?
The first part of this question is answered negatively in the article that opens the issue: the Russian translation of the Introduction to Pekka Hämäläinen’s pioneering study The Comanche Empire, characteristically titled “Reversed Colonialism.” Hämäläinen shows how, over a hundred years (from the mid-eighteenth to the mid-nineteenth centuries), the Comanche tribal confederation took control over enormous swathes of territory in the southern part of today’s United States. In fact, the Comanche empire established colonial relations of domination and exploitation with the outposts of Euro-American colonists. The formal colonial empires of Spain, France, and Britain turned out to be, in effect, in tributary relations with “savages.” The example of the Comanches clearly illustrates that imperialism and colonialism was not a privilege of modern European societies and of the political forms they created.
In Hämäläinen’s work, we see how giving agency to historical actors who had so far been viewed solely as victims and objects of European colonization fundamentally changes the picture of the peopling of North America by Europeans. This is not to say that this colonization was not accompanied by the extermination of native Americans. Rather, the history that we access by changing perspective and giving agency to historical actors is much more rich and complex, with a multidimensional moral and ideological subtext.
This also answers the second part of the question about the exclusively Western forms and meanings of colonialism. Getting back to the ancient Greeks and their colonization of Ionian islands, Italy, and the Black Sea Coast, we can recall that historians usually employ the categories of cultural transfer and economic exchanges, although without forgetting about violence and military engagements. Taking the logic of dictionary definitions seriously, we presume that colonialism can play an important role in population migrations, in the circulation of ideas and technology, and in the transformation of social structures and political cultures of the societies of the metropole and the colonies (as was the case in antiquity).
Filed under: Empire, Europe, Russia, Scholarship and insights | Closed
extract in lieu of abstract:
When Seeley set himself the task of examining ‘historically the tendency to expansion which England has so long displayed’, he divided his lectures in two along a ‘natural’ division between those people ready for self-government and those not yet ready. The first were what he called ‘Greater Britain’, including the United Kingdom and the settler colonies of Canada (and Newfoundland), the Australian and New Zealand colonies, Cape and Natal, as well as the West Indies. The second group included India and all other dependencies. Mantena agrees with Seeley’s distinction between self-governing and dependent colonies.
[…]
Mantena is hardly alone in accepting Seeley’s distinction as the key to explain the evolution of the imperial constitution. In the aftermath of decolonisation, Pocock called for a ‘British history’ that would encompass the settler colonies of the British empire. James Belich and Duncan Bell, among others, have shown that Seeley’s ‘Greater Britain’ arose in the 1880s and ‘was big and powerful in its day, a virtual United States, which historians of the period can no longer ignore, nor dismiss as a failed idea.’ Legal historians have also answered Pocock’s call with detailed comparative studies of discrete legal subjects like property and marriage. Recent scholarship has also examined ‘aboriginal’ or ‘indigenous’ rights in the settler colonies. All these studies reinforce the constitutional unity of the settler colonies ‘emerging’ as distinct Dominions, in contrast to India and the African colonies ‘winning’ or ‘being granted’ independence. ‘Indirect rule, the rule through native institutions,’ Mantena reminds us, ‘would be hailed as the unique and defining principle of British imperial rule in Asia and Africa’. She cites approvingly Low’s argument in Lion Rampant that the new forms of rules developed in India at the end of the century were then transplanted in south-east Asia and Africa.
Filed under: Empire, law, Scholarship and insights | Closed
robert goodin on settling
Robert E. Goodin, On Settling (Princeton University Press, 2012).
In a culture that worships ceaseless striving, “settling” seems like giving up. But is it? On Settling defends the positive value of settling, explaining why this disdained practice is not only more realistic but more useful than an excessive ideal of striving. In fact, the book makes the case that we’d all be lost without settling–and that even to strive, one must first settle.
We may admire strivers and love the ideal of striving, but who of us could get through a day without settling? Real people, confronted with a complex problem, simply make do, settling for some resolution that, while almost certainly not the best that one could find by devoting limitless time and attention to the problem, is nonetheless good enough. Robert Goodin explores the dynamics of this process. These involve taking as fixed, for now, things that we reserve the right to reopen later (nothing is fixed for good, although events might always overtake us). We settle on some things in order to concentrate better on others. At the same time we realize we may need to come back later and reconsider those decisions. From settling on and settling for, to settling down and settling in, On Settling explains why settling is useful for planning, creating trust, and strengthening the social fabric–and why settling is different from compromise and resignation.
So, the next time you’re faced with a thorny problem, just settle. It’s no failure.
Filed under: Scholarship and insights | Closed
Juan Obarrio, ‘Symposium: Theory from the South’, Salon 5 (2012).
In lieu of abstract, first paragraph:
The essays that follow were originally presented at a round table on Jean and John Comaroff’s latest book, Theory from the South. Or, how Euro-America is evolving toward Africa (Paradigm 2012) held at the American Anthropology Association annual meeting (Montreal, November 2011). They represent the spirit of collegial yet critical engagement in which the event was organized.
Filed under: postcolonialism, Scholarship and insights, Southern Africa | Closed
This paper outlines the ways in which the conception of social integration and its practical realization have developed over time in Australia, and the various pathways that models of integration have followed. It makes a distinction between the approaches to inclusion of the indigenous population, the Australian Aborigines in broader Australian social life and social institutions, and those dealing with populations of incoming migrants, refugees and asylum-seekers. Although there are similarities in the models of integration mobilized in both arenas, the differences and interactions are also significant and characteristic of what is specific about settler-colonial societies. The central models in both fields are assimilation, integration and multiculturalism, and the paper will sketch briefly how each model has operated both in theory and in practice, how they have succeeded and interacted with each other, how they have intersected with other types of concerns, such as citizenship, civilization and security, as well as what might be distinctive about the Australian approach to social integration in comparison with other countries.
Filed under: Australia, Scholarship and insights | Closed
onur ulas ince on wakefield
Edward Gibbon Wakefield (1796-1862) is principally known for his historical role as a colonial entrepreneur involved in the colonization of South Australia and New Zealand. Less acknowledged and analyzed is his position as a British political economist. Wakefield edited annotated volumes of Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations, corresponded with Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill on matters of political economy, and received Karl Marx’s critical praise in Capital.
This paper examines Wakefield’s writings on colonial political economy for excavating some of the social and cultural problems that attended British settler societies in the early Victorian period. Situating these problems at the intersection of imperial political economy and post-Enlightenment categories of civilization, I maintain that Wakefield’s schemes of “systematic colonization” presented an attempt to resolve the famous problem of “falling profits” in England, while at the same time ensuring “civilized” colonial settlements. Profitability could be restored, Wakefield argued, by exporting excess labor and capital to newfound colonies and establishing an imperial division of labor that would seal the prosperity of the empire as a single economic unit. However, spontaneous settlement of the colonies suffered from social dispersal, economic stagnation, and civilizational relapse characteristic of “frontier” communities. Under the centrifugal tendencies of free-for-all colonization, the social division of labor collapsed, and Britons, once members of the most advanced commercial society ever known, gradually descended into a semi-nomadic, rude, and barbarous state. In response, Wakefield advocated public-private partnerships in promoting colonization, strict government regulation of colonial settlements, and the imposition of an artificial, “sufficient” price on colonial lands. I contend that these policy measures coalesced into a grand plan for alleviating the economic troubles of the British metropole and making sure that such alleviation did not come at the price of barbarizing British subjects in the colonies. Political and legal power would be mobilized for transposing Britain’s distinctly capitalist civilization to the colonies in an orderly fashion, or put differently, the domain of capitalist civilization would expand to the colonies without a frontier. In the process, Wakefield justified imperial intervention in the economy by recasting it as simply the enforcement of a utilitarian settler contract he imagined to exist between colonial capitalists and colonial laborers. The paper concludes by drawing out the broader implications of this analysis for conceptualizing the constitutive role of political power in the history of capitalist economic relations, our present moment not excepted.
Filed under: Australia, Empire, New Zealand, Scholarship and insights | Closed
Indigenous activists and anarchist Settler people are articulating common ground in opposition to imperialism and colonialism. However, many anarchists have faced difficulties in Indigenous solidarity work through unintentional (often unwitting) transgressions and appropriations. Through the introduction of settler colonialism as a complicating power dynamic, we observe that anarchists bring unconscious spatial perceptions into their solidarity work. Further, Indigenous activists often perceive anarchists as Settler people first and foremost, which carries another set of spatial implications. We examine a number of examples of anarchist and Indigenous activism, at times empowering and at times conflictual, in order to reveal some general trends. Through an intensive synthesis of Indigenous peoples’ theories and articulations of place-based relationships, we suggest that deeper understandings of these relationships can be of great importance in approaching solidarity work in place and with respect.
Filed under: Scholarship and insights | Closed
William and Mary Quarterly 69, 3 (2012).
FORUM: COLONIAL HISTORIANS AND AMERICAN INDIANS
James H. Merrell, ‘Second Thoughts on Colonial Historians and American Indians'(pp. 451-512).
Andrew Cayton, ‘Not the Fragments but the Whole’ (pp. 513-516).
Wendy A. Warren, ‘More than Words: Language, Colonization, and History’ (pp. 517-520).
Juliana Barr, ‘The Red Continent and the Cant of the Coastline’ (pp. 521-526).
Michael Witgen, ‘Rethinking Colonial History as Continental History’ (pp. 527-530).
Mark Peterson ‘Indians and the National Narrative: The Trouble with Words and with Us’ (pp. 531-534).
James H. Merrell, ‘Coming to Terms with Early America(pp. 535-540)’.
Filed under: Scholarship and insights, United States | Closed
Journal for the Study of Peace and Conflict (2011-12). Contains, among others:
Tammy Murphy, ‘“Courses and Recourses”: Exploring Indigenous Peoples’ Land Reclamation in Search of Fresh Solutions for Israelis and Palestinians’.
Jacinta Chiamaka Nwaka, ‘Host-Settler Relations, Conflict Dynamics, and Threatened Identity in Kano’
Filed under: Africa, Israel/Palestine, Scholarship and insights | Closed
